At the end of January this year, I wrote a rather harsh, but honest article on the state of SkyOS. I was very worried that the closed-source operating system, for which users have to pay in order to beta test it, would never reach a final version, something that was promised to the people paying the price. This feeling was strengthened by a lack of updates; we were five months without news, six months without a release, and 8 months without a changelog update. My article got the ball rolling, but now that we're five weeks down the road, is that ball still rolling?

So, I will write another one of these articles in six weeks. And in twelve weeks. And in 18 weeks. Until this issue is resolved one way or the other.

Would you really waste your energy on kicking a dead horse again and again?

Probably Robert is even right in stating that legally no-one can demand from him to open-source his OS. I suppose that the 30 USD for the beta access did not put a legal obligation onto him to either deliver a final product or open-source the code. The small print probably said that if a stable release comes, you will get access to it, if not then not.

I think it is more important to learn from this experience as much as you can. Even if you do not adhere to the religion of Free Software and are not a member of the Church of Emacs, this teaches you what the consequences of giving up your freedom by relying on non-free software are.

If a software is supported by a large-enough corporation, the risk of loosing your investment may be quite small, but if it is a small group or even a single individual, this is just way to risky. Same as it was with ZETA (which of course, had also legal issues and was more expensive)

There was another very promising OS which was developed almost single-handedly by one hacker: AtheOS, by Kurt Skauen. Skauen never allowed other hackers to work on the core os, he wanted AtheOS to remain his baby alone and to control everything. At one point, Skauen lost his motivation and the whole OS just perished.

However, fortunately Skauen had released AtheOS under the GPL. And this is why we have the Syllable OS today, which is still progressing and has come a long way since it took over. If we look at Syllable, we see that it has remained faithful to the original goals of AtheOS: It is still an incredibly fast and easy to use desktop OS, without any bloat.

Now Robert has to make his choice. He can open-source it or just continue to sulk and let his work of many years fade into obsolescence. There is no other option. Which company would pour money into a beta OS for the PC? There is no market for this, remember the demise of Be, Inc.